By Bob Hennelly

This Labor Day, the most pressing question we in the labor movement can ask ourselves is how to reverse the historic decades-in-the-making decline in the percentage of workers represented by a union.

By Steve Wishnia

AUSTIN, Tex.—On Aug. 30, at the end of a summer in which the temperature in Austin topped 100° for a record 45 consecutive days, a local judge ruled unconstitutional a new state law intended to nullify local ordinances that require water breaks for construction workers.

Courtesy of People’s World

By John Bachtell

In The Man Who Changed Colors, storyteller Bill Fletcher Jr. offers readers a many-layered political suspense thriller that had me enthralled from cover to cover. The story, told through the eyes of David Gomes, an undaunted reporter for the Cape and Islands Gazette, is set in Cape Cod, Mass., in the late 1970s and unfolds amid the dynamics and tensions of the Portuguese and Cape Verdean communities, the latter of which Gomes is a part.

Who Do You Trust More? 

By Bob Hennelly

By Friday, all of the striking nurses at New Brunswick, New Jersey’s Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital will lose their employer healthcare coverage. No new talks are scheduled.

By Joe Maniscalco

Retired NYPD Lieutenant Jack LaTorre, 68, rode his bike over from Bay Ridge to Sunset Park Monday afternoon, hoping to ask New York City Mayor Eric Adams why he insists on trying to strip municipal retirees like him of their traditional Medicare benefits and push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan.

By Bob Hennelly

It’s the Strike Summer Edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour as we talk with U.S. Sen. Cory Booker on why the nurses' strike at Robert Wood Johnson University in New Brunswick, New Jersey is of national significance in the battle over safe staffing that puts people ahead of profits.

By Joe Maniscalco

A few weeks after losing another case in court, the heads of New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] now want City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to believe efforts to stop them from privatizing retiree health care hurts collective bargaining rights. But how’s that work? No one — including members of the MLC — appears to know.

Work-Bites Network

On the latest episode of Labor This Week, host Mark Harrison interviews New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees President Marianne Pizzitola and attorney Jake Gardener about what to expect in the ongoing fight against the privatization of municipal retiree healthcare in NYC.

By Ryn Gargulinski

The worst boss I ever had was a robot. Well, not a robot in “The Terminator” sense that would blow your head off if you didn’t hand in an assignment on time. But a robotic time-tracking software that recorded and shared my every single move.

By Steve Wishnia

Sometimes I see my role as a journalist as being a forensic scatologist: What kind of s—t is falling towards us? Whose butt is it coming from? What pathogenic bacteria does it contain?

By Joe Maniscalco

The next great general strike to captivate the United States will not be organized — it’ll be organic. And it could be the most transformative general strike this country has ever seen

By Steve Wishnia

It was not an AI-generated crowd scene. It was all humans.

This week in New York City, hundreds of striking actors and screenwriters, joined by supporters from numerous other unions, packed two blocks of Tenth Avenue, across from the offices of HBO and Amazon in the plutocratic slab of Hudson Yards. It was part of a national day of solidarity with the strikes by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers’ Guild of America.

By Bob Hennelly

New York City Mayor Eric Adam’s awarding of a $432 million dollar no-bid contract to handle the city’s influx of undocumented migrants last spring to DocGo, a for-profit medical services company, is just the latest example of municipal government outsourcing its response to a crisis — even as it cuts or leaves vacant tens thousands of civil service jobs.

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we revisit the United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 strike against the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ as it enters its third week. The union is pressing its demands for an accountability mechanism for staff to patient ratios. Local 4-200 Union President Judy Danella and Debbie White, RN, president HPAE, New Jersey largest nurses’ union, talk about legislation pending in Trenton which would create a state standard for nurse staffing that would put patients ahead of hospital profits.

By Steve Wishnia

Almost 3,000 occupational and physical therapists [OT/PT] in New York City public schools are in the process of revoting on a contract they rejected by a 2–1 margin last month.

By Joe Maniscalco

Despite some very strange efforts to obscure the fact, Medicare remains one of organized labor’s all-time greatest achievements 58 years after President Lyndon Baines Johnson first signed it into existence with Harry and Bess Truman proudly standing by.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

As the nurses’ strike at New Brunswick’s Robert Wood Johnson University entered its second week, sources say the major sticking point is what sort of enforcement mechanism can be relied on to ensure the hospital maintains whatever levels of staffing that it commits to.

Work-Bites Network

This past Friday, New York State Supreme Court Judge Lyle E. Frank issued a decision permanently prohibiting New York City Mayor Eric Adams from forcing 250,000 retired municipal workers, most of them former union members, out of traditional Medicare and into a profit-driven Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan.

By Joe Maniscalco

“Yaaaay!”

New York City retiree Roberta Gonzalez reacted with total glee today after learning municipal workers fighting to retain their traditional Medicare health insurance coverage have won yet another big victory in court.

By Bob Hennelly

It is said that history is written by the winners. But when it comes to big wins by organized labor, the corporate news media, itself fighting unionization at all costs, tends to ignore unions even when they are shaping history.